


The Sunset Room

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Bazhir, Building a Better Future, Forgiveness, Gen, History, Legacies, Lies, Peace, Prejudice, Promises, References to War, References to racism, Secrets, Sunset Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 06:37:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18360647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Ali Mukhtab shows a young Geoffrey the Sunset Room.





	The Sunset Room

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Minor Character Week Event as part of the Free for All at Goldenlake. 
> 
> Contains references to racism and violence. Please exercise discretion in reading.

The Sunset Room

Ever since he learned that the Bazhir had a secret room in his father’s castle–that had been the Bazhir’s only castle a generation ago–Geoffrey had longed to explore it, but the only key was entrusted to his father’s steward, Ali Mukhatb, who would mysteriously disappear into its shadows every evening at sunset. Bold as he was about begging Ali to share a thousand Bazhir legends with him, he was somehow too shy to ask Ali the Sunset Room. It seemed too much like trespassing on a sacred Bazhir place, the only one the Bazhir had been able to negotiate to keep truly their own–under their control–when they had surrendered to Jasson the Conqueror. 

Since he couldn’t question Ali about the Sunset Room, he had asked his father, whose voice and eyes had gone hard as sand pelting the face as he answered, “It’s a monument to their bloody history. It’s filled with mosaics celebrating their savagery. That’s the only artwork such a barbaric people can create or appreciate.” 

Geoffrey had regretted asking his father about the Sunset Room because it had provoked such a hateful response from someone he wanted to see as the embodiment of justice and honor, so he never again mentioned the Sunset Room in his father’s presence, not even on the eve before he left to enter page training when Ali offered to show him the Sunset Room before he rode off to the Royal Palace for the first time in his life. 

As he stood in the Sunset Room as the orange disc of the sun sank into a red horizon, Geoffrey didn’t know why exactly Ali had invited him here though he suspected that Ali wished to send him off with a final reminder of who the Bazhir were before he started to live in and learn the lies of the north. The lies that spoke of Bazhir savagery. The blood-soaked lies that justified a conquest. 

All he knew was that the Black City that cast such a dark shadow as dusk fell was both more beautiful and more terrifying–glittering with all the forbidden promise of stolen obsidian–when viewed from the perfect vantage point of the Sunset Room. 

“It’s beautiful.” Geoffrey couldn’t bite back his surprise. Somehow it was the beauty of the Black City that had stunned him the most. He had, on some level, anticipated the terror, but not the beauty that had left his mouth agape. 

“The Nameless Ones built a beautiful city.” Ali stroked a pillar that seemed to be a tribute to the glory of the Black City when the Nameless Ones had inhabited it so many centuries ago. “They grew gardens green as the Emerald Ocean and fertile field stretching farther than the eye could see. Someone could travel through leagues of grain without glimpsing a speck of sand.” 

“That sounds”–Geoffrey fumbled for a word before deciding on one that conveyed only a fraction of his awe at the verdant landscape this arid desert had once been–“magical.” 

“It was.” Ali’s finger hovered like a storm cloud over an image of Bazhir toiling in the Nameless Ones’ fields. “A magical lie. They built their cities, planted their gardens, and tended their fields on the backs of Bazhir labor. They enslaved us with their magical lies–their musical voices more beautiful than any sound produced by human mouths or instruments. When we discovered the truth, we had to rain fire–their only fear–down from the sky to defeat them and it took the strength of all our shamans to trap them in the Black City. To this day, their spirits still escape, slipping into the dreams of Bazhir children to draw the children to the Black City from which they never return.” 

Geoffrey stared at the mosaics that depicted fire falling from the heavens like shooting stars and thought of the promises Jasson the Conqueror had made to draw some Bazhir chiefs into an alliance with him before his campaign against the Bazhir began in earnest, promises he had broken. Those tribes were called loyalist because they bore nominal allegiance to the Crown but Geoffrey understood they weren’t faithful to the Crown so much as they were rejected by the renegade Bazhir, who had fought the northern invaders from the first. 

“We northerners lied to the Bazhir as well.” Ducking his head, Geoffrey felt compelled to assume responsibility for the crimes of his people. After all, his own father had fought in Jasson’s war against the Bazhir and been rewarded years before Geoffrey was born not with the fertile fief he had longed for but with barren sand and a people he despised as much as they did him–a people he was expected to govern with fairness and firmness. Geoffrey might have felt sorry for his father if his father hadn’t been so determined to conquer the Bazhir as a knight in Jasson’s army. He had wanted to conquer the Bazhir; now let him try to govern a people as wild as the desert wind. 

“That’s in the past.” Ali’s hand ruffled Geoffrey’s hair in an affectionate absolution. “Bazhir and northerner alike must move beyond our violent history if we are to create a peaceful future between us. You’ll live that peaceful future one day as will your father, no matter how impossible he might find it to imagine that now.” 

“You will too?” Geoffrey, who could not think of anyone who had done more to advance peace and understanding between the Bazhir and northerners, couldn’t envision the harmonious future Ali described without Ali being a central, vital part of it. 

“No.” Ali gave a slight, sad smile. “I’ll only catch a glimpse of it before I fade into eternity, but that glimpse will be enough to assure me that everything I sacrificed to accomplish this future was worth it. It will be a glorious future for Bazhir and northerner alike, I promise.” 

Ali promised this, and Geoffrey believed it in his bones as he gazed across the darkening desert at the abandoned Black City.


End file.
